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BIcycle Traffic

I got a ticket about 5 weeks ago for running a red light northbound on Valencia at 14th, one of the safest and most obvious place to maintain one’s momentum and go through an empty intersection. I stopped a half block later to talk to a friend, and lo and behold a squad car pulled over and treated me like I’d done something wrong, wrote me a ticket after lecturing me and refusing to let me say anything about the ethic of cycling, traffic patterns, etc. It’s a whopping $370 ticket!

So of course I’m going to court on July 1 to contest it. I’ll let you know what happens.

But it’s an interesting question, one that I’ve addressed before in print, but it’s coming up again. I’m speaking at the Grizzly Peaks Cycling Club on May 18 about Critical Mass and I’m sure the law-abiding riders of that group will be very disapproving of my ideas on this. I run red lights and stop signs all day every day. It’s quite safe. I mentally have to stop at every intersection whether the light is green or red. Cars often run intersections and if I’m not paying attention I will be killed. That’s a huge motivation to preserve one’s safety. Additionally, I have a personal standard that I won’t run a light or cut through traffic if it forces an oncoming motorist to swerve or brake suddenly. That’s just basic safety and courtesy.

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May 1st, 2005 | Category: Public Space | One comment

Critical Mass April 05

We had another really lovely Critical Mass here on Friday night. I think we may have reached 2,000 riders, but at least 1,500. It was huge! We went south for a change, along the waterfront, wrapped around the ballpark and across the venerable 3rd Street bridge into the eerily emerging city-state of Mission Bay and its fortress-like biotech UC campus. Not much going on there on Friday night though, but the balmy weather and beautiful early evening light underscored how nice the new public park waterfront and campus panhandle will be in a few years.

The worst incident of the night erupted towards the end of our meandering towards 3rd Street when a few blue-collar guys were stopped by an idiot on a bicycle who appointed himself Czar of Stopping Oncoming Traffic. I rode past as one of the workers was yelling, “Hey I’m tired and I just want to go home!” while one of his pals gave a firm shove to a bicyclist, hurling him to the ground. I heard later it turned into a full-fledged melee of fisticuffs… glad I wasn’t around for it!

But that’s the deal with Critical Mass. It’s what you make it. If you don’t like stuff going on, you have to intervene and make it different. I’ve done that plenty of times, but I–like many of my friends who have been part of this for years–am pretty tired of newbies (the next generation, for better AND worse!) who don’t quite ‘get’ the culture (or maybe they’re just the logical descendents of the always lurking Testosterone Brigade) and repeatedly ride into oncoming traffic when there’s absolutely no need to do it.

Continue reading Critical Mass April 05

May 1st, 2005 | Category: Critical Mass, Public Space | Leave a comment

Sex Pioneers

I’m not going to write a long entry here. Just had that odd internet moment when two apparently unrelated but actually closely intertwined links appeared to me in a matter of minutes. Firstly, on a small private email list, a friend brought up Andrea Dworkin’s recent death, and made some positive comments about her. I was peripherally on the sex-positive scene in the mid-eighties when my ex- (Caitlin Manning) was making Stripped Bare, a documentary on five local strippers here in San Francisco. One of the friends we made during that time was Susie Bright, and as my email pal surmised, she has a very interesting take on Dworkin’s passing. I always thought of Dworkin as this dark, sex-hating, depressed unhappy woman. I never met her or heard her or even read her, but she was the caricature of all that weird penis-hating, man-hating feminism that seemed to take over intelligent discussions of real social relations in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Flash forward to 2005. On today’s SF Gate website, there’s a nice piece by the always interesting Gregory Dicum on a new sensation that started in Norway and is now in Berlin. A 20-something couple launched an eco-porn website called fuckforforest.com, and they’ve already raised nearly $100K for their strange combo of hardcore porn and eco-proselytizing about the state of the forests and the planet. I went there but wasn’t motivated enough to plunk down my $15 for a month of porn… at least not yet! But maybe you are, dear reader!

April 13th, 2005 | Category: General Musings | Leave a comment
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